The DvL event has reminded me how great this game WAS at one time...

[gabigool]

Wow...I never pieced that one together...maybe "story" isn't all players really want huh?

 

I have a bunch of characters at 65 with no starship.

 

But I'm sure the biggest two categories are players quitting and players that enjoy pvp

 

(and obviously, EMFBY)

[Pietrastor]

But regardless, the best part of this game is indubitably the original class missions. Which is why I don't begrudge this event as much as most (though I still hate how it completely locks out earlier unfinished characters)

 

Best part is the quantity of the class stories (+ planetary arcs, side quests, bonus series, FP questchains etc) rather than the actual quality. Not saying this in a negative way, quantity in games in particular IS value, but KOTFE is easily better written, interesting and executed than most of the original stories in the game. It doesn't change the fact that we went from 10 different stories with a bunch of side quests to a single unified story but still

 

As for OP, lack of big explorable new worlds is definitely noticeable. On that front, I can't understand why Bioware won't merge the 2 concepts - big worlds and tight corridors. Public areas of Zakuul City and Swamps could've easily been much bigger and filled with side quests. Not every world has to be massive, Korriban or Ilum work fine in their size. But when you have Endless Swamps as small as they are, it feels like set decoration for cutscene triggers rathern than an actual world. Ilusion of scale matters.

Edited July 14, 2016 by Pietrastor

[LogicalPremise]

I actually liked Makeb a great deal, and was surprisingly pleased by Shadow of Revan and Ziost. It wasn't as tightly knit as the class stories but still pretty good.

 

So far, KotFE has been somewhat disappointing to me in terms of story. It's been long enough since I made characters that rolling up new ones is fresh and interesting again and far more appealing than chapter whatever of "Why is the Emperor interested in my smuggler?"

[Pietrastor]

I actually liked Makeb a great deal, and was surprisingly pleased by Shadow of Revan and Ziost. It wasn't as tightly knit as the class stories but still pretty good.

 

So far, KotFE has been somewhat disappointing to me in terms of story. It's been long enough since I made characters that rolling up new ones is fresh and interesting again and far more appealing than chapter whatever of "Why is the Emperor interested in my smuggler?"

 

The Emperor stuff is tired as hell by now, despite much improved presentation (vastly superior voice work than in vanilla game/SOR/Ziost). But the Zakuul society, Senya, Scorpio, Gemini, Eternal Fleet, Knights of Zakuul are all very fresh and interesting for TOR. There's mystery, sense of discovery and wonder in the game again that was lacking a lot during the unimaginative Dread Masters saga, Revan conclusion that probably wasn't needed at all and didn't made any statement in the end, some very predictable and trope-filled moments in class stories etc.

 

I enjoyed Makeb a great deal too because it utilized not-your-everyday antagonists. Hutts worked great after Malgus, dragging Dread Masters saga etc. Plus - both the Empire and Republic came to the planet with 1 goal and were forced to redefine their objectives completly and do something they don't usually do (save a planet in Imp case, evacuate in Rep case).

 

TOR stories have always worked the best when trying new things and avoiding tried fiction/Star Wars tropes. Not a coincidence that the Agent story turned out most captivating for the majority of the players. KOTFE delivers a ton of that (despite unnecessary dragged-on Emperor), in terms of lore and galaxy-state it was a much needed shake up

Edited July 15, 2016 by Pietrastor

[Ethern]

Well the game is cut in half.

 

Vanilla benefited from billions of dollars of development and the overall quality is better there.

 

Makeb, shaodw of revan , Kotfe did not and it is highly visible , being in term of lack of romance , companions development, the mandatory withdrawal of individual classes stories development, etc.

 

I stopped playing swtor for years, came back at around chapter 13.

This and the DvL event made me realize how the story was better in the base game, but alas how the quests variety was nonexistent. It's all about mob bashing, and it tired me really fast. At least in wow that routine is broken with puzzles, mini games, other chars incarnation, vehicles shooting, etc.

That's the reason why I'm quite burned out with questing in this game so fast , despite interesting stories.

[CrutchCricket]

I think you guys are again getting the gameplay and story aspects mixed up. And yes they are different.

 

Story IS the main appeal that draws people to this game, either a SW story or a story written by Bioware. Typically it's both. The problem is that story (or stories because let's remember there were eight stories in one game) got dragged through the MMO grind until they were mangled and barely remembered. Literally, the first time I ran the Knight story by the time I got to Belsavis I had forgotten what the hell I was supposed to be doing. And I don't care that WoW had/has more grind or that in the ancient days of EQ the grind rivaled the building of the pyramids, grind is not what people want these days nor was it what they wanted five years ago.

 

So it's disingenuous to look at stats like that third year infographic or how fast people blow by/want to blow by 1-50 and go "welp looks like the story sucked and that's not what people wanted after all", or like one poster claimed, that KOTFE is actually better than the class stories. Pro tip: it's not, it's simply more concentrated. KOTFE story plays like a normal game, its quests are not constantly broken up by side quests, planetary quests, endless mobs of mooks to cut down over and over again (bonus multiplier for backtracking) and all. the. slow. ***. traveling. Notice how more complaints rose up over the monthly chapter half rather than the 1-9 half? Is the second half really objectively worse? Or does it merely lose quality because it marks time and drags out like the class stories did? Take any random sample of people who played from CH 10 onwards one month at a time vs someone (like me) who'll play it all in one go and see who has the most complaints about it on average. If I were a betting man, I'd definitely put money on the first group.

 

I know personal examples of people that fit that infographic statistics by the way. My one friend was technically the one who got me into this game as he had a beta weekend invite before I did. He leveled a consular on Tython during that weekend while I leveled a Knight. He stopped half way around Coruscant, while I managed to get to Taris before the weekend was up. When I got into the game proper a year or so later he tried it out again when it went F2p. This time he could barely get off Tython (the F2p restrictions probably didn't help but that's another matter). Why? All the grind. The slow *** travel, the walking back and forth for every side quest and planetary arc (and this is Tython we're talking about, it's nothing compared to later planets). He had gotten into GW2 in the meantime and this was downright sluggish by comparison. He liked the story ok but the gameplay just put too many obstacles for him to bother with.

 

Now a bit about my experience. I managed to slog through all the way to Quesh or so on my main Knight and get a SI to Tatooine with deleting and rerolling at Nar Shaddaa because I missed banging that one cult chick. But eventually I just gave up. Chapter 1 was absolutely horrendous containing twice the number of planets as the other chapters, including some of the biggest ones in the game, with the most tedious being the one right after the capital world (i.e. right when I started to feel the grind). It hit you right when it shouldn't. And every planet was the same. You land there's triangles everywhere and you had to get them to get enough XP. Then there's missions that had bonuses, sometimes several, then there's heroics which made every triangle feel like Russian roulette because I knew if I got it I'd have to either waste time LFGing while I was close to it or waste time driving back and forth when a group finally did fall from the sky. And then when you finally exhausted all the missions and you've quite forgotten what you were there to do story wise (all teh quests just blurred together at that point) when you made for the spaceport to finally get off that rock, there'd be another triangle waiting for you which would start, you guessed it a damn bonus series- time for more driving, slogging, shooting, respawning, looting until hanging yourself seemed like the better alternative. I came back a year later and finished my Knight, SI and did Agent and BH too, and to this day, if I never do another Imperial planetary arc, it'll be too soon. 12XP and the streamlining initiative it brought forth was the only reason I finished the rest and quite possibly the only reason I keep coming back. Because now I can focus on story and skip the grind. Mostly. Sort of. We'll see with my new Knight 3.0

 

And what about the stories themselves? Well whatever innate quality they had got dropped down a few pegs by the repetitive marking of time they had to do to hit every planet, whether it was narratively necessary or not. This was again, the worst in Chapter 1. Let's break it down:

Knight: Stop the superweapon thing! And then this superweapon thing! And then this superweapon thing! And then... yeah we get it.

Consular: Save this master from space possession. Then this master! Again! One more time in case you didn't get it.

Smuggler: Maybe the only one that fit since it was set up as a treasure hunt type thing.

Trooper: I can't even remember. Was it track down the traitors one by one? Of course it was. Because they came to prominence together but turned separately. Or something.

 

Same with the Imperial stories. Find the artifact (x4) or kill the things (x4) (x3). In standalone, non-MMO games or in other media all that fat would be trimmed and what remained would be more polished. The fact that the class stories survived the bloat of both MMO grind and narrative thumb twiddling and turned out pretty sweet is something we genuinely have to give the original writers credit for. That and doing the usual Bioware thing of making us attach emotionally to cartoons via befriending and/or virtually boning them.

 

So tl;dr for those who don't want to read a whole damn thesis: the class stories are definitely the best thing in this game despite the bloating the MMO format imposed through gameplay and repetition, and it was this bloat that made so many people averse to the 1-50 experience, not the stories themselves.

[Rolodome]

I dunno. KOTFE sticks out in my mind as a much more memorable experience than any of the class stories so far. I think the only one I've played that comes close is the SW story and a few moments in the Agent story. Smuggler I remember fondly, but there's only one moment I really remember.

 

I take it what's happened is all the hardcore fans of the original SWTOR design stuck around and then KOTFE came out, and many of them were like, "Wait, what? I'm a hardcore fan of SWTOR, not KOTOR!" I think KOTFE is much more of a story built for hardcore KOTOR fans. If you think of it as a separate game from the rest of SWTOR, it feels much more like that classic KOTOR experience. If you try to think of it as another multi-player phase in the MMO that is SWTOR, then yeah, I can see the frustration.

[CrutchCricket]

I dunno. KOTFE sticks out in my mind as a much more memorable experience than any of the class stories so far. I think the only one I've played that comes close is the SW story and a few moments in the Agent story. Smuggler I remember fondly, but there's only one moment I really remember.

 

I take it what's happened is all the hardcore fans of the original SWTOR design stuck around and then KOTFE came out, and many of them were like, "Wait, what? I'm a hardcore fan of SWTOR, not KOTOR!" I think KOTFE is much more of a story built for hardcore KOTOR fans. If you think of it as a separate game from the rest of SWTOR, it feels much more like that classic KOTOR experience. If you try to think of it as another multi-player phase in the MMO that is SWTOR, then yeah, I can see the frustration.

YMMV though I have to ask, when was the last time you did class stories? And how often? Memory can be simply chalked to that.

 

I still think the tightness of the KOTFE narrative are what people are picking up on, not necessarily that it's objectively better (maybe not the best word since all of this may be opinion). Another factor is also what class you did it with and indeed how you approach it. It seems that non-Force wielders are out of place in it. Me, I used my insta-60 and treated it like a new character, separate story and it worked out pretty well. I'd say if you take a character that fits and like you said take it in isolation, it's comparable to the class stories, though not necessarily better. Ironically, even though I never personally played either game I'm treating KOTFE as more KOTOR2 than KOTOR. Sequel with female protagonist after the male main of the original disappeared.

[Pietrastor]

or like one poster claimed, that KOTFE is actually better than the class stories. Pro tip: it's not, it's simply more concentrated. KOTFE story plays like a normal game, its quests are not constantly broken up by side quests, planetary quests, endless mobs of mooks to cut down over and over again (bonus multiplier for backtracking) and all. the. slow. ***. traveling. Notice how more complaints rose up over the monthly chapter half rather than the 1-9 half? Is the second half really objectively worse? Or does it merely lose quality because it marks time and drags out like the class stories did? Take any random sample of people who played from CH 10 onwards one month at a time vs someone (like me) who'll play it all in one go and see who has the most complaints about it on average. If I were a betting man, I'd definitely put money on the first group.

Except that people HAVE experienced concentrated class stories too, with 12xp, post-4.0 XP gains with XP armor etc. That didn't change any of the weak points in class stories or the general "rankings" (aka Agent still widely considered the best). And yes, a couple of post-launch KOTFE chapter recieved criticism because they HAD multiple problems, not due to monthly gaps. Chapters 13-15 are well liked and appreciated, heck, no one expected Profit and Plunder to be so well recieved. Kaliyo and Aric Chapters moved slowly and Kaliyo one in particular had awfull gameplay with neverending stream of autospawning skytroopers. Chapter 12 was deservingly criticized for lazy implementation for non-Force classes.

 

it was this bloat that made so many people averse to the 1-50 experience, not the stories themselves.

It's a completly rose-colored view to proclaim all class stories were great and only the MMO bloat was standing in their way. They were not all equally great. Some had more better moments, good ideas, companions, pacing, some less. Some clearly stood out in a positive way for a reason despite having the same amount of MMO bloat as others. Edited July 15, 2016 by Pietrastor

[Ethern]

CrutchCricket you nailed it.

 

Indeed the grind is less insufferable now. We can focus on the stories and skip a lot of the side quests. But the grind is still there and disrupts it too much. Mob density and lack of variations in tasks exacerbate the issue.

 

I recently finally finished all class stories in order to get the legendary status. The story aspect was cool, but it nerveless felt like an unenjoyable chore.

[CrutchCricket]

It's a completly rose-colored view to proclaim all class stories were great and only the bloat was standing in its way. They were not all equally great. Some had more better moment, some less. Some clearly stood out in a positive way for a reason despite having the same amount of MMO bloat as others.

I never said they were all equal. Each had their highs and lows and everyone has their preferences and tolerances. Some also incorporated the bloat better than others (like I said, teh smuggler treasure hunt was more conducive to hitting every planet than the Knight's "Superweapon du jour").

 

That doesn't mean they can be dismissed as a whole since they were the main selling point of this game and the reason (some) people put up with the grind. Their differences were also part of the selling point. Want to be a Jedi Knight? TOR is for you! Want to be a Sith? TOR is for you! Want to have nothing to do with the Force and just be a regular trooper or a smuggler or a secret agent? TOR is for you. These days it's, "welp you better care about stopping the white-clad Starkiller wanna-be or you're out of luck."

[Pietrastor]

I never said they were all equal. Each had their highs and lows and everyone has their preferences and tolerances. Some also incorporated the bloat better than others (like I said, teh smuggler treasure hunt was more conducive to hitting every planet than the Knight's "Superweapon du jour").

 

That doesn't mean they can be dismissed as a whole since they were the main selling point of this game and the reason (some) people put up with the grind. Their differences were also part of the selling point. Want to be a Jedi Knight? TOR is for you! Want to be a Sith? TOR is for you! Want to have nothing to do with the Force and just be a regular trooper or a smuggler or a secret agent? TOR is for you. These days it's, "welp you better care about stopping the white-clad Starkiller wanna-be or you're out of luck."

 

Which is why I said the quantity of them was the main value of TOR, not necessarily the actual quality. As for "Fullfill your power fantasy of being this & that Star Wars trope!" approach, it was the #1 mistake Bioware made, inserting way too much bad and predictable tropes into the class stories. Whenever they strayed most off them they worked the best instead of feeling like a Greatest Hits checklist "A Knight must fight Emperor at end! A Warrior must be Vader-like Emperor's number #1 executor!" etc etc

Edited July 15, 2016 by Pietrastor

[kirorx]

Yeah...that's likely mostly because it was also NEW at that time.

 

Honestly, the leveling experience has improved exponentially since launch!!! A lot of that "open world" feel you're talking about was due to the fact that we didn't have speeder points unlocked, we didn't have instant QT, combat sucked because you gained new skills so seldom...we had to WALK, or speeder, EVERYWHERE! It took 3-days PER planet. Side quests weren't optional, you HAD to do them to get enough XP...then you'd have to do the PvE space missions to stay ahead of grinding mobs...

 

Don't let nostalgia cloud your judgement...there have been HUGE improvements in many areas since those horrific days and nothing about the world size has changed...how you are forced to interact with them has. I can't even imagine how many characters were abandoned before Tat.

 

Agreed.

 

This game has improved a great deal since launch.

[LyraineAlei]

Well, money. There was/is no way they would be able to continue 8 major unique story arcs. I've never once heard them say otherwise, and in interviews I have specifically seen them say that they could not continue to focus on 8 separate stories.

 

Now is that in the context of when they thought this was still an MMO? I do not know.

 

But I believe the plan had to have initially been for the class stories to have been amazing but this was supposed to be an MMO. Sadly that fact caught even BW by surprise, and they still have not learned.

 

The point is, if you do not care about player retention this game is fine. Awesome even. But player retention requires an abandonment of the type of content we saw leveling up because it's simply not realistic to produce in quantity.

 

The only way you could even imagine unique class story (beyond the token Rishi style drive-by) again is if this game gets back up to near launch subscriber level which is probably impossible, but most certainly impossible when people leave as quickly as they join.

 

It is strange to me that it seems only the players want this sort of success for the game.

 

I absolutely agree about how class unique stories is likely to never happen (no matter how muhc I and others may want them to come back), but KotFE as a whole is a very Force-user focused story (regardless of the parts that are less so).

I would like for more variation between the classes, if we can't have full class-unique missions like we used to.

 

Or at least have faction unique stories like Makeb did.

 

To the OP-

I fully believe the base game is the best story-wise content (not that it doesn't have its pitfalls and parts I don't care for- like JC Acts Two/Three in comparison to Act One, Imperial Balmorra, Republic Taris, Quesh' class story amount and lack of heroics) because every class had a unique story. There are times where those stories got bogged down if the planet story went too far out of the way (Quesh, Tatooine, both come to mind as big ones where the planet story was bogging the class story the most down. My Inquisitor may have motivation for Tatooine's. My Sith Warrior, Jedi Knight, and Trooper may have motivation for Quesh's), but for the most part, the class uniqueness is fun and a better flavoring even in sidequests (even as late as SoR Yavin IV daily side quest with the relics acknowledged my Darth Imperious' status "We'll have this delivered to your ...." but the 'your' part was unique to SI).

 

I recently gave WoW a try, and found that the individual species had some uniqueness to them as well, though that seems to end once the specie base zone is finished and is joined by the others.

[CrutchCricket]

Which is why I said the quantity of them was the main value of TOR, not necessarily the actual quality. As for "Fullfill your power fantasy of being this & that Star Wars trope!" approach, it was the #1 mistake Bioware made, inserting way too much bad and predictable tropes into the class stories. Whenever they strayed most off them they worked the best instead of feeling like a Greatest Hits checklist "A Knight must fight Emperor at end! A Warrior must be Vader-like Emperor's number #1 executor!" etc etc

"Quantity" is misleading. The selling point is not "look we have eight stories" but rather "look you can be (almost) everything most people want to be in the SW universe". Variety is a better term.

 

Also tropes are tropes for a reason and Star Was is a very closed system for that sort of thing. There's a very narrow definition of what "feels like Star Wars" and you better hit that or risk getting eaten alive. You need to have the good vs evil (Jedi vs Sith) you need to have it scored by Williams-esque music, otherwise why are you calling it Star Wars? You need to hit those beats and only then also provide something new. TOR would not have sold as a genuine Star Wars story based on the agent story alone. But once you did knock out the Knight faces the Emperor and the rise of the Sith (getting to the fall at some indeterminate time) criteria, then you can also focus on a new perspective.

Edited July 15, 2016 by CrutchCricket

[Rolodome]

YMMV though I have to ask, when was the last time you did class stories? And how often? Memory can be simply chalked to that.

 

I still think the tightness of the KOTFE narrative are what people are picking up on, not necessarily that it's objectively better (maybe not the best word since all of this may be opinion). Another factor is also what class you did it with and indeed how you approach it. It seems that non-Force wielders are out of place in it. Me, I used my insta-60 and treated it like a new character, separate story and it worked out pretty well. I'd say if you take a character that fits and like you said take it in isolation, it's comparable to the class stories, though not necessarily better. Ironically, even though I never personally played either game I'm treating KOTFE as more KOTOR2 than KOTOR. Sequel with female protagonist after the male main of the original disappeared.

To begin with, I tend to think that there's no such thing as objective with these stories anyway. There's basically no stories like this in the game industry to even compare them to (unless you include single-player). I guess I should give a nod to GW2, but let's be real... there's no comparing GW2 to the moral-choice-dynamic that this game offers, along with the multi-player structure of an MMO.

 

So right off the bat, I would say we can pretty much throw objectivity out the window. Since there's no comparison, it would be hard to give it a proper critic's review. Granted, we could examine each story on a purely storytelling level and critique that, but that has limitations. As you pointed out, the normal experience of the class stories is interspersed with lots of distractions, sidequests, slowing down when there are supposedly "dire" circumstances, etc. And this is arguably something we can't involve in the critique of the class stories since it is part of their inherent gameplay structure.

 

In other words, it's very difficult to separate the game from the story.

 

With that out of the way, my personal take is... KOTFE stands out to me as a better story experience. Every class story that I've done all the way through was within a couple of months ago, so it's still pretty fresh in my mind. I did KOTFE for the first time right after finishing the Makeb > Shadows > Ziost chain, which I did right after completing Smuggler. I even did a lot of progress during the May double XP event, so I was able to skip a lot of side stuff. So it was a pretty fair approach to see it, for me.

 

I would actually argue that from a gameplay standpoint, KOTFE would be even better if it was closer to the beginning of the game, rather than the end-game story that it is. Granted, it would need some retouching to handle the "you're amazing" component and it would need a little introduction to set that up, but I feel like a lot of the gameplay elements in KOTFE (I'm looking at you, mobspam) would detract from it a lot less if KOTFE was merged into the normal MMO leveling experience (which more or less fits with what you said about using an insta-60 character). As it is, I have yet to play KOTFE and really need to kill those mobs for XP, so they are kind of a pointless presence from a gameplay standpoint.

 

Also, the first time I did KOTFE was as a Smuggler and it felt fine to me. I don't know, this is where my "made for hardcore KOTOR fans" reasoning comes in. My story is, I played this game in beta, then abandoned it for years, and came back in the last couple of months, after having just replayed KOTOR1 and 2. But I don't think my preferences ever aligned that well with the style of classic SWTOR. I always found the class stories to be a little lacking, a little over-repetitive and linear. I think some of that is just my preference for stories in general. I enjoy them, for the most part, in the moment, but there are few moments that stick with me. In my mind, the mark of a really good story is when stuff sticks with you long after. But again, I think part of that is just who likes what.

 

I recall watching a Ghostbusters review recently (the classic first movie) from some internet critics I respect and they were raving about how good it was and waxing nostalgic and talking like it was the second coming. And I was sitting there like.... well it's cool they enjoyed it so much. But when I watched that movie, it just sorta struck me like... eh. Like, at the time, I didn't get the humor of it at all.

 

Anyway, I don't begrudge anyone who prefers the class stories over KOTFE. *shrug* It's cool that you were able to approach it in your own way.

[Suzsi]

I enjoy the game much more now then when it was launched. I guess that's just me though.

 

When it launched, I didn't play for long. I've been back now for several months and still totally addicted.

 

Leveling at the beginning was totally painful. You had to repeat every single planet quest just to level and xp gain was sooooo slow. Credit gain was even slower. For those who love the stories, the current set up of this game is far, far more enjoyable. I have completed almost all of the class stories, done some twice and I am still looking forward to repeating a couple of my favorite ones again. At the start I got through one class story, part of a couple of others and gave up it was so painful.

[CrutchCricket]

To begin with, I tend to think that there's no such thing as objective with these stories anyway. There's basically no stories like this in the game industry to even compare them to (unless you include single-player). I guess I should give a nod to GW2, but let's be real... there's no comparing GW2 to the moral-choice-dynamic that this game offers, along with the multi-player structure of an MMO.

 

So right off the bat, I would say we can pretty much throw objectivity out the window. Since there's no comparison, it would be hard to give it a proper critic's review. Granted, we could examine each story on a purely storytelling level and critique that, but that has limitations. As you pointed out, the normal experience of the class stories is interspersed with lots of distractions, sidequests, slowing down when there are supposedly "dire" circumstances, etc. And this is arguably something we can't involve in the critique of the class stories since it is part of their inherent gameplay structure.

 

In other words, it's very difficult to separate the game from the story.

I do compare them to both single player (mostly Mass Effect, but other SW games too like Force Unleashed or Jedi Outcast/Academy) and SW stories in other mediums (mostly the novels). Is it entirely fair? No. But I willingly overlook the limitations and bloat of the medium and conclude they're in the general neighborhood.

 

And yeah GW2 is nothing by comparison. Imagine my disappointment when I make a mesmer who wants to join the circus and imagine her as a lighthearted jokey character and then all she says is "Yes sir I am honor bound to help you" like she's talking at her graduation. The strengths of that game are clearly in other areas.

 

I don't think it's difficult to separate gameplay from story though. Ideally, gameplay should support story and make you feel like you're what the game claims you are. Most decent single player games achieve this rather easily (or at least they make it look easy). Here, I don't think that will ever happen. If anything MMOs are the opposite of gameplay immersive, unless you're meant to play as a virtual accountant or something. So I have to enjoy the story in spite of the gameplay. And lucky for me I have a propensity for doing that. And I think what makes them really stick is the classic Bioware touch- you choose what to say (out of a limited selection but it still provides the illusion of choice), it's fully voiced and then the characters react emotionally to it. You get invested in these interactions and that's the "gameplay" element that makes you enjoy the whole thing. You take that away, and yeah maybe a few of them would be lackluster. But I think that applies to KOTFE as much as it does to the original class stories.

 

With that out of the way, my personal take is... KOTFE stands out to me as a better story experience. Every class story that I've done all the way through was within a couple of months ago, so it's still pretty fresh in my mind. I did KOTFE for the first time right after finishing the Makeb > Shadows > Ziost chain, which I did right after completing Smuggler. I even did a lot of progress during the May double XP event, so I was able to skip a lot of side stuff. So it was a pretty fair approach to see it, for me.

 

I would actually argue that from a gameplay standpoint, KOTFE would be even better if it was closer to the beginning of the game, rather than the end-game story that it is. Granted, it would need some retouching to handle the "you're amazing" component and it would need a little introduction to set that up, but I feel like a lot of the gameplay elements in KOTFE (I'm looking at you, mobspam) would detract from it a lot less if KOTFE was merged into the normal MMO leveling experience (which more or less fits with what you said about using an insta-60 character). As it is, I have yet to play KOTFE and really need to kill those mobs for XP, so they are kind of a pointless presence from a gameplay standpoint.

 

Also, the first time I did KOTFE was as a Smuggler and it felt fine to me. I don't know, this is where my "made for hardcore KOTOR fans" reasoning comes in. My story is, I played this game in beta, then abandoned it for years, and came back in the last couple of months, after having just replayed KOTOR1 and 2. But I don't think my preferences ever aligned that well with the style of classic SWTOR. I always found the class stories to be a little lacking, a little over-repetitive and linear. I think some of that is just my preference for stories in general. I enjoy them, for the most part, in the moment, but there are few moments that stick with me. In my mind, the mark of a really good story is when stuff sticks with you long after. But again, I think part of that is just who likes what.

 

I recall watching a Ghostbusters review recently (the classic first movie) from some internet critics I respect and they were raving about how good it was and waxing nostalgic and talking like it was the second coming. And I was sitting there like.... well it's cool they enjoyed it so much. But when I watched that movie, it just sorta struck me like... eh. Like, at the time, I didn't get the humor of it at all.

 

Anyway, I don't begrudge anyone who prefers the class stories over KOTFE. *shrug* It's cool that you were able to approach it in your own way.

I suppose we could agree that KOTFE could stand in for a class story in the beginning of the game. It's essentially my "class story" for my insta 60. But beyond that, yeah it's just preferences. And I guess I'd understand your point of view better if I knew what you differentiate between when you say KOTOR feel/style vs SWTOR feel/style. Again, I haven't played the former but my understanding was this game was supposed to very similar (apart from the obvious MMO aspects).

Edited July 15, 2016 by CrutchCricket